Disappearing Guest Room

You know you've been in your house for a while when your "before" pictures were "after" pictures not too long ago. In the cascading changes that started with our new addition and ended with the kids each getting their own bedroom, we redid the guest room after finding a new use for the furniture in there (more on that later). The biggest change: installing a Murphy bed, so now the room is so much more spacious for our crafting activities and still can transform into a guest room for the few times (seriously, just once or twice a year) that we have visitors.

After much research by D, we went with Wilding Wallbeds for our Murphy bed. They were a little pricy but we liked that they were made with all real hardwood, rather than plywood, MDF, and veneer. Specifically, we got the Remington in natural/alder finish.

The problem? The thing was SO hard to build. D is very handy (seriously, just wait a few posts and I'll show off his amazing carpentry skills) and I watched him struggle to put it together. And, in fact, there are some holes in the wrong spot. Because he had to DRILL HIS OWN HOLES. We knew this would be no IKEA assembly, but we still figured that holes would be predrilled, for example. It didn't help that we were up against a deadline because of course it would, in fact, be the once-to-twice-a-year time that we were having visitors. For a couple of weeks, the room looked like this:

Before I show you how great the finished product looked, let me dig up a picture from a 2021 post as our "before" picture.

And here it is now! We got a bookshelf on one side and the desk addition. The desk is so cool--you can leave things on the desk when the bed is open. Look at all that floor space!

And here is the bed extended. You can see that decor-wise, it looks very similar to how it did pre-Murphy bed. Same pictures, same bedspread, etc. But now we have a queen-sized bed and a much cushier mattress, instead the full-sized regular bed that had been there. And it folds right away for most of the year!

We also made a few updates on the other side of the room. Here was the "before" picture:

I chose to keep the vanity I had used in our pre-addition bedroom rather than the campaign desk (real wood antique-store find rather than a Target buy) and I lost the storage in the tall dresser and had to figure out where to store my craft supplies. 

You may recognize that tall piece from a very different place:

That's right. I moved around some doors and spray painted the bottom drawer (and the leg caps) gray and now it's blends right in! No more neon green, no more baby room. Just lots of beading, fabrics, and embroidery floss storage.

And it wasn't really worth photographing, but most of the closet storage we installed in the office here has now been relocated to this room. The door unit now contains most of our paints and glues and the mesh drawers holds playdoh, stamps, and knitting supplies. And most important, it's all contained and largely neat (or, at least, hidden away).

The hard part now is just remembering to call it the craft room and not the guest room!